Silly question about fondant decoration

This is a silly question but I'm so curious. Do people ever eat the fondant decoration of a cake or they just take them off and eat the cake? I'm referring to figures, flowers etc. Why do we make sure figures are edible? Have little experience on this topic so bare with me :)

Little kids will eat it. It's better to keep things edible but I've often thought how stupid it is to make some things out of fondant when you could just use the real thing and save time. Like candy...If I make a cake with candy on it I use real candy, not candy made of fondant. Because if I was a kid who thought I was getting a lollipop, and the lollipop ended up being made out of fondant, I would be MAD.

I often make figures that are fondant/gumpaste and tell the customer they shouldn't try to eat them because they have supports. Kids and many adults will try to eat EVERYTHING! I like being able to say the whole thing is edible, so whenever I can I do make everything out of yummy fondant. All of my cupcake toppers and most of my cake decorations can and will be eaten. i also try to do everything as close to the date as possible. Fondant does not taste very good when it has been sitting around for a while. I even make ones that look like candy. I've had cakes with real candy on them, and it was unpleasant to try to eat it. In fact, my kids stopped eating the cake completely because it was too hard to eat with the candy on it! The trick is to still make it all yummy.

I recently had a friend show me a fantastic dragon cake that was at a party her daughter attended. It was really well done! Unfortunately the baker had clearly been more concerned about looks than taste, as even the 7 year old commented that it didn't taste very good!

Thank you all for all you answers! I was just wondering why I was worrying about making nice fondant decoration and figures if people would pill them off and not eat them most of the time. Would be easier to use other non-edible stuff to make the cake look pretty without that much effort if people wouldn't eat the decoration anyways. But thanks, all make more sense now.